zlacker

So many questions, like how would you protect from bit flips, damage to circuits. "10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth." I am not sure if we need a rocket scientist to calculate the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator and just letting it run. What happens when the servers need to retire due to some unpatchable bug

>>blourv+(OP)
Yeah, radiation is the enemy of integrated circuits, cosmic radiation is more damaging the smaller the features get.

You pretty much have to have multiple redundancy and special space-rated HW, which I wouldn't be surprised is stuck at super old process nodes to mitigate this exact same issue.

>>blourv+(OP)
> "the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator"

I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun).

    (/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200)   ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio
          ([year] 10)         ;; guess at lifespan
          ([ton] 100))        ;; Starship payload
       (* ([ton] 1000)        ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp
          ([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄
    
    ;; => 126.226944

>>torgin+e2
Tbf, leaving aside the claims about datacentres in space, working with Nvidia on radiation hardening its latest generation chips would be a good project...